very few people admit to it, at least few people i know, but walk in most newsagents and there are quite a few to chose from. thing is you rarely see people buying them, but maybe that’s cos they wait til the shop’s empty.
occasionally you get the odd weirdo who picks a porno off the shelf and starts flicking through the pages, right in front of other people. never understood them myself - do they get turned on getting erections in public places?
Well, maybe (speaking a tiny bit from experience, not that I’d ever do it, seriously) they’re seeing if any of the pictures are worth buying it for. For later, you know.
Seems to me that porn stores wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t get enough people coming in and buying the stuff…
<hijack>
Actually, once my friend and I got kicked out of a porn shop in Rochester… apparently one has to be older in the city (20?) than in the country… it looked like a crummy place but if he needed business that badly he would have let us stay? (!)
</hijack>
well i live in UK and here we dont have too many porn stores, so newsagents are the main place to buy (unless you want hardcore).
Nope. Speaking as someone who used to work in a 24 hour convenience/deli/liquor store, if he let you stay and possibly purchase something, he would be liable for a large fine. In Las Vegas, about 15 years or so ago, if I had sold booze to a minor, I would have lost my job, AND been fined $500. The store would have been liable for another monetary fine. I don’t remember exactly what the fine for selling porn mags to minors was, but we kept those behind the counter.
I am a typical overeducated suburban professional, married, and mother of a toddler. And I’ve bought it. So obviously normal people buy them.
Damn, they’re expensive though. $7 bucks for Penthouse Forum?!? I had no idea!
There’s enough free, high-quality porn in alt.mag.penthouse to choke a thousand chickens. 
…and with a name like NutWrench, you KNOW it’s true.
…um, that doesn’t look like a chicken…
::chuckle::
I worked at a bookstore in Tyson’s Corner, VA. Roughly thirty percent of our sales revenue came from best-selling books, forty percent came from the other books and random merchandise, and thirty percent came from magazines. Somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the total revenue came from pornographic magazines alone. Unfortunately, porno mags also represented the second-highest theft rate of any merchandise category in the store. (That’s the only piece of semisolid information you will find in this reply. The rest is for entertainment purposes only.)
A friend of mine and I spent months categorizing the various types of respectable-bookstore-porno-enthusiasts.
The Morally Repressed: You’ve seen it parodied a million times: “Let’s see, I think I’ll take a copy of The Truth About Money, the latest from Michael Chrichton, one of those John Updike books on golf, a bookmark, and, um, this copy of Oui.” I suspect a lot of these folks just stole 'em, sorta like honest people who shop normally but steal the Preparation H anyway.
The pubescent: I will walk a complete cirucuit around the store, glance longingly at the magazine rack, work my way from news to housekeeping to fishing to muscle and fitness, stop for a minute at Guitar Player and Creem, then dart for an instant to grab a copy of High Society before carefully perusing Good Housekeeping. Then, it’s off to the back of the store to secure the goods, and then march straight for the door, looking as guilty as Rudolf Hess at Nuremberg. Sometimes we’d mess with these kids and ask 'em if they saw anything they liked, but I wasn’t about to ruin some kid’s life just 'cause he was tired of flipping through the back pages of his sister’s latest Cosmopolitan. The Hafts are assholes, anyway.
Eidetic Man: This guy must have a photographic memory. In NoVa, porno must be sold sealed in plastic. This guy goes ahead and grabs what he wants to look at, opens them, carefully scans the pages, then secrets them away either in the magazine rack or elsewhere in the store when he is done and leaves. We loved these guys, because of course we couldn’t sell these mags and had to return them, but not before many a lunch-half-hour of careful examination by much of the staff. On one monumental occasion, we had one unapologetic fellow return no less than seven copies of the hardest-core stuff to a poor young cashier, saying he just realized he wasn’t supposed to open them. Sorry, I’m a bastard.
The Crrreeeeeep: Why in the name of Elbridge Gerry do some people want to take pornography from the shelf back to the freaking children’s books, look at them there, and then drop the pono mags among the kiddie books? I don’t know, but it happened all the time. We were pretty sure this was more than just one person, 'cause we were watching, closely, for this sort of thing. We caught at least two different guys doing this–both white males in their early twenties–and ran 'em out. Happened at least once a month, probably more often.
The Aficionado: “Can you tell me the approximate arrival date of the December Cheri?” Nothing wrong with these folks. They know what they want, and don’t care what you think. They’re collectors, I think.
The 'Core Consumer: The difference between this person and the repressed ones is largely one of degree. Regular customers who like porno is pretty much the best description of these folks and they are by far the largest group of purchasers. In general terms they were of many different shapes and sizes, but universally well-behaved and well-adjusted, as far as one can tell in thirty seconds of check-out interaction.
We had a pretty diverse clientele at my bookstore, but porno definitely separated the men and the women from the boys and the girls. We essentially had to close off the bathrooms, 'cause too many times we’d either catch or find evidence of someone using those magazines in a manner best reserved for after purchase.
Me? I liked Leg Show. That mag is whacked.
Well, sometimes it’s hit or miss.
I checked out their link to “The Mammoth Book of Erotic Stories” and I think you all should know right now that I couldn’t find ONE erotic story about Mammoths in it!
–Nut
I worked in a triple-X movie rental place for a couple months; we had a selection of pornographic magazines in front of the cash register, and a smaller selection of really, really, filthy German stuff under the counter.
We also sold cigarettes cheap. About 90% of our business was cigarettes. The movies didn’t make much money, and were a hassle to handle. The only saving grace to the job was calling prominent citizens in town and saying “Hi, you rented ‘In And Out Of Africa’, and it’s two days late.”
With as much porn as there is on the internet, why would anyone buy a magazine? Hell, it would be cheaper to buy some high quality print paper and print your own collection off the net, not that I have done that. :rolleyes:
well i must say porn off the net is ok but there’s nothing quite like having a magazine full of the stuff.
btw, anyone ever seen a woman buy porn mags?
Hijack…
I’m going to quote South Park The Movie “what the F**K is wrong with German people.” Look around either in magazines or do a net search. German porn is not right. On second thought, don’t look, I’m still trying to erase parts of my brain.
being a experience puchaser of porn (uh hum), us sickos do wait until no one is in the store before we buy dirty mags. Ever since I got the internet though, why embarass yourself buying a copy of “swank”? lol
Had to add this one too. Yes I have seen women buy porn, and I knew her. The situation was hilarious, we were dating and very open sexually. We went to a adult bookstore, and she purchased some guy mags. Turned out, lol, when she got home and opened it up, it was a magazine for gay men. Lol, I won’t go into detail but needless to say, both of us, being hetrosexuals, were turned of for a few days straight after seeing the shocking photos.
What is the deal with German porn? I’ve never seen it. I did buy a Playgirl once; had to ask for it at Waldenbooks (embarassing!). But I thought I had seen everything until I saw the South Park movie and read this thread about German porn… please clue me in.
lol, I have too many stories of porn mishaps. My ex-girlfriends idiot little brother(he was 19 at the time) borrowed a porno movie from me. Well, he was going to the local blockbuster to return a movie, my girlfriend and I also had a movie(non-adult, it was like good willhunting or something like that) so we asked him to return ours also. The idiot somehow placed my porn movie in the box and I recieved a call from a very angery video clerk saying I needed to give them their movie back and pick up my “8 the hard way” copy. Needless to say I walked into the store with flaming red embarassment, and for 3 years he hasn’t heard the end of it.
She looks like a respectable GQ by day, but she’s really a naughty little MPSIMS at night. Off you go, little bird. 
bibliophage
moderator GQ